Falling Fast

Chapter 14 - Ice Ice Baby

Come on Lexis don’t ignore
me. I wanna patch things
up. We can do whatever you
want. 

It was a message from the one and only Daniel Cormic who, for some reason, I still thought of as Danny. There were eighteen other messages from him too, but I didn’t look at them so that she wouldn’t know I’d been snooping. As I stared at the phone I saw a little bit of red as I remembered the hand shaped bruise he’d left on Lexie’s face.

The sound of the bathroom door unlocking made me spring away from the desk and then walk slowly back towards it making it look like I’d only just got up off the bed. I grabbed a pen from the desk-tidy and walked over to where she was stood in front of the mirror. I remembered that this was the dress she went to our year eleven dance in. She’d gone with the aforementioned Danny. I’d been about to ask if cutting such a beautiful dress up was a good idea, but decided that this would probably be good for her.

Ok, so I was going to be doing all the cutting and ripping so it was going to be cathartic for me if anyone, but at least she’d now see this dress as the dress she wore as a cosmic ‘fuck you’. 

We chatted about our hopes for the party and debated how Luke was going to do his place over for it this time as I marked up the bits that I was going to destroy and she asked me about my costume. Wanting it to be a surprise I stayed a bit vague and gave her lots of coy looks.

“Oh, fine, be vague about it,” she laughed. “But it had better be awesome.”

“It will be,” I assured her.

We spent the rest of the night talking and only just managed to get up with Lexie’s early alarm. She was more of a morning person than I was so whilst I was in her shower she went and did something that required hand eye coordination like eating cereal or something. Then we swapped places and I felt lost in the huge kitchen and we were out of the house before the rest of the family was up for which I was glad.

I loved Lexie and her family, but it was a large one. Lexie’s mother had run out on her and her three brothers when she was about four or five and one of her dad’s colleagues Joy had helped them all get through the trauma. In time Joy’s husband died of cancer and after a while she and Andrew, Lexie’s dad, got together and she had three boys of her own. Then Andrew and Joy had twins… it was a huge family. Loving and brash and active and huge.

I hated to think what mornings around here looked like on a school day. I wondered how Lex coped with eight brothers. I only had one and he could be more than enough. As he proved as soon as we walked in the front door.

“So when are you having kids?” he asked. “I mean, Zo, you’re a dirty stop out and we all know you two shared a bed last night.”

I just blinked at him and rummaged in the cupboard for some cereal since all I’d been able to find before giving up my quest for food at Lexie’s was a bar of chocolate. Lex, however, decided this was an argument she could win.

“You should know, science boy, that it’s impossible for two women to conceive.”

“I never said it was just you two in it,” he said smoothly as he spooned ice cream into his mouth. I nearly told him off, but decided it was a good idea and stuck my head in the freezer. And screamed.

“Dan!”

“What?”

“What the hell?” I asked and pulled out a doll he’d found from somewhere in the attic.

Ok, so that doesn’t sound too terrible but he’d used my paints on it to give it a hideous face with a grimace, given it intestines and blood. There was even ice coating it so it all shimmered and refracted the light a little bit. I had to admit that it was a pretty good effort for someone who proclaimed he couldn’t do art.