"People can get used to anything." Nan always used to say.
By the time Kelly was entering her teenage years, the old woman was very old indeed. She had turned ninety-four the same year the girl turned 15, but Kelly liked her best out of the motley collection of relatives available to her. When they had gone to Elaine's childhood home on Kelly's birthday that year, she grimaced her way through the cake. They were sat around the kitchen table, the old wooden structure that had withstood so many years of dinner and breakfast and knocking down of dough. Kelly hated the feeling of everyone looking at her and she sat miserably through the stories from her parents and siblings, and nodded unhappily at her grandparent's awkward attempts at advice she would need now that childhood was coming to a close. The eight-seater table was full, and Elaine had brought the cake with them, homemade chocolate cake with sweet cream. There were candles and gifts and everyone did their best, but the atmosphere remained stilted.
Kelly hated it. She felt mawkish with all the eyeballs upon her. She couldn't stand the feeling of everyone waiting for a certain response. She was bound to let them down when she didn't exclaim in happiness at the gifts and she dreaded the opening. Nothing she said, nothing she felt seemed natural. It was all forced and the girl had no idea what a genuine reaction would be, or how anyone would take it.
It was excruciating. She sat through it all, her face burned, she tried desperately to smile big enough that they would accept the expression of happiness and just move on, but it always felt too little or too much and she waited, in agony, for someone to accuse her of faking.
Worst, the moment was surely approaching that everyone would expect her to eat the cake. She loved chocolate cake, in truth. And she loved sweet cream. But Kelly had not eaten more in a day than was required to remain alive in months. The teasing at school had become unbearable. She was fat, and ungainly. Another girl in her class, Anita, had taken much joy in noticing that Kelly wore bike shorts under her school skirt, to lessen the chance of a mishap in which her underwear would be spotted. Anita had seen, and in school assemblies she would sit behind Kelly, and lean forward to whisper in her ear "you're wearing them too high, we can still see your thunder thighs".
The other girls followed Anita. She was beautiful. She had olive skin and long hair that was light brown but seemed to have natural blonde highlights. She had bright green eyes and high cheekbones. She was thin, and athletic, and she turned heads of men old enough for it to be inappropriate. Because their last names both started with W, Kelly and Anita were consistently sorted into groups together. The school did everything by alphabetical groups. They were in groups together in drama class, they were in teams together in P.E, they were on projects together in art class and english class and history class. Everywhere Kelly went, there Anita was, tossing her perfect hair, and whispering in Kelly's ear.
By now, they had just been placed in the same class together for a second year in a row, and Kelly's stomach twisted into a familiar knot and just never let go. She could no longer think that she just had to make it through the year and Anita would probably be sorted into a different class and she could just torment another W girl there instead. They were now, in year ten, facing the class group that they would be in permanently, for the remainder of their secondary schooling. The only way out would be to request to be moved, and that would require making an argument to the principal. Kelly could not stomach the thought. She had decided that she would rather starve.
So now, here she was. Sat at the kitchen table in her grandparents house. In front of her was dinner, all her favourites. There was roast lamb, hasselback potatoes, roast vegetables and mint sauce. And next to it all, the glistening chocolate cake, with unlit candles, waiting for dessert.
It was hell. Not the temptation of the food. The agony of trying to think of how she could avoid eating it, and not have her family suspect why. If she had to take one bite, her resolve would wobble. The hunger pains, silenced by permanence, would return the second she filled her stomach. The adults chatted aimlessly about Kelly, and she couldn't hear a word. She could hear only the screeching panic in her mind.
Kelly did not attend discos. She did not speak up in class. She did not enter competitive sports, or audition for stage parts in drama class. She gave presentations when she had to. Other than that, Kelly attended school in absentia as far as social engagement was concerned. The truth was, Kelly didn't understand the other students. She didn't understand the sporty kids, or the drama nerds, or the kids obsessed with science. She didn't understand the outcasts, either. All of them seemed to be heavily invested in things that didn't really seem to matter.
Kelly didn't say much, but she was always listening. She wasn't seen much, but she was always watching others - especially the adults in her life. So far, she couldn't see anything that happened in school that carried over into adulthood. Exam results, grades, trouble that kids get into in school - none of it seemed to carry a lasting impact. Kelly took this observation, and turned it into an ability to not worry about school beyond something she had to get through without failing too badly. She wasn't rude, she didn't make enemies, but nor did she make friends. She became a mediocre student and didn't particularly care. Mediocre was enough.
Teachers tried to engage her in subjects, but nothing was of special interest to her. As far as adults could see, Kelly was an average student, happy to just coast along.
It was almost the truth. The whole truth was that she was tired. Kelly didn't coast because she didn't want to achieve more, she did it to conserve energy, even though she wasn't really aware of this. Kelly couldn't focus on the smaller swings and roundabouts of life at school because she was too focussed on the bigger things in her life, which all unfolded at home. She lay awake at night, hours after going to bed, listening in unrelenting attentiveness for the sounds that often came from her parents bedroom. Kelly was certain that one day, she would hear the Final Confrontation between her parents.
She was patient. And she waited.
The death of her father swept into Kelly's life like a cold, harsh wind. She had always had a nervousness around him, a quiet kind of anxiety, instinctively knowing inside her bones that no matter how sweet his words her, he lived one inch away from exploding at all times. She tread carefully around him, trying to avoid landmines.
When he died, it was as though she awoke. As though she crashed through the surface of water and breathed deeply for the first time. She no longer tiptoed in her house, she no longer mutely awaited the day that it would all go wrong. It had all gone wrong, and here she was. Here they all were. Her tiny, bird-like mother had triumphed somehow. It went entirely unsaid, completely unacknowledged, but Kelly watched her mother hover an inch from a total breakdown every minute of every day from the day they had been told of Greg's death. Kelly remembered, more clearly than she remembered anything else in her life, sitting on the couch and being told her father was dead - and knowing with concrete certainty that her mother was lying.
The worst part was being excluded. Being treated like a child. Nothing at school seemed to matter anymore. Anita became an irritating fly, buzzing nearby. One day, about two weeks after Kelly's world became father-less, Anita had cornered her at the lockers, snapped the waistband on Kelly's skirt and hissed that the ground shook every time Kelly's feet hit the floor. Without even thinking, Kelly, completely exhausted of patience or caring at this point, had shoved the other girl violently into the lockers and punched her in the stomach. Anita had gone down hard and Kelly just walked away. There was nothing left in her now. No fear remained, no nervous edge, no anxious need to please. She was devoid of any capability to care about consequences. Anita never told anyone what happened, and she never spoke a work to Kelly again.
Kelly looked to her mother now. In the wake of Greg's death, Kelly began to look at her mother and see a silent kind of strength, a ruthless sort of love, the savage decision to protect her children. Come what may. In the void of pretence that was the Lie of Greg's death being an accident, Kelly watched her mother very carefully. Elaine wasn't watching her children in that time. Her gaze was turned outward, wondering what the police knew. Kelly could tell it was bad, by the thousand yard stare, she could see her mother beginning to understand that they were living with only the skin of their teeth between them and total collapse. But Kelly wasn't going to say anything. She had a plan. She had the syringe now. But there was one other thing that she needed, and only one person in the world who could possibly have it.
