Kevin Brooks - See Through Me

First published in Great Britain in 2019

by Electric Monkey, an imprint of Egmont UK Limited

The Yellow Building, 1 Nicholas Road, London W11 4AN

Text copyright © 2019 Kevin Brooks

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

First e-book edition 2019

ISBN 978 1 4052 9391 4

Ebook ISBN 978 1 7803 1825 7

www.egmont.co.uk

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Stay safe online. Any website addresses listed in this book are correct at the time of going to print. However, Egmont is not responsible for content hosted by third parties. Please be aware that online content can be subject to change and websites can contain content that is unsuitable for children. We advise that all children are supervised when using the internet.

Egmont takes its responsibility to the planet and its inhabitants very seriously. We aim to use papers from well-managed forests run by responsible suppliers.

true adj 1in accordance with fact or reality; not false, wrong, or made up 2faithful; constant; agreeing with reality

false adj 1not based on reality; untrue or incorrect 2intended to deceive; artificial; illusory

Cover

Title page

Copyright First published in Great Britain in 2019 by Electric Monkey, an imprint of Egmont UK Limited The Yellow Building, 1 Nicholas Road, London W11 4AN Text copyright © 2019 Kevin Brooks The moral rights of the author have been asserted First e-book edition 2019 ISBN 978 1 4052 9391 4 Ebook ISBN 978 1 7803 1825 7 www.egmont.co.uk A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Stay safe online. Any website addresses listed in this book are correct at the time of going to print. However, Egmont is not responsible for content hosted by third parties. Please be aware that online content can be subject to change and websites can contain content that is unsuitable for children. We advise that all children are supervised when using the internet. Egmont takes its responsibility to the planet and its inhabitants very seriously. We aim to use papers from well-managed forests run by responsible suppliers.

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Acknowledgement

Back series promotional page

My name is Kenzie Clark.

I’m eighteen years old now (it was my birthday last month), and sometimes I forget that my last day of normality – the last day of my life as a relatively ordinary girl – was only two years ago. It doesn’t feel like two years. It feels like a lifetime, like I’ve been like this for ever. And sometimes, when I think back to the days before the horror, I find it almost impossible to remember the ‘me’ I used to be – the child, the teenager, the girl who wasn’t like this. It’s as if she never existed. I’ll be lying awake at night, staring into the darkness, trying to picture her . . . trying to remember how she looked, how she was, how she felt about things . . . and nothing of her will come to me.

All I’ll see is all I am.

A faceless face, eyeless eyes, a skull, bones, blood . . .

All I am.

A lot of my memories of the day it happened are either shattered beyond recognition or buried so deeply that I doubt they’ll ever come back, but I know it was a rain-sodden Sunday – I remember getting soaked when I went to the corner shop to get Dad’s newspaper – and I’m fairly sure that it started out as just another day.

I would have got up at the usual time – around seven o’clock – and before doing anything else I would have checked on Finch, my younger brother, just as I did every morning. We shared a bedroom, so all I had to do to make sure he was okay was get out of bed and shuffle across to his side of the room. If he was still asleep I would have left him, and if he was awake, which he usually was, I would have asked him how he was doing and if there was anything he needed – water, the toilet, any painkillers or anything. I can’t recall how he was that morning, but I’m pretty sure I’d remember if it had been one of his really bad days, because that was the only time he ever showed how much he was suffering. The rest of the time he kept it to himself, and most mornings he’d just give me a tired smile and tell me he was fine.

I can still hear his voice sometimes . . .

Hey, Kez . . .

. . . all weak and croaky.

How’s it going?

And always that smile . . . the one just for us. Like a momentary light in the gloom.

The day would have passed like any other Sunday – looking after Finch, helping Dad with the housework . . . cleaning, cooking, washing and ironing, sorting out my school clothes for tomorrow. I probably had some homework to do – I usually left it till Sunday – and I know for sure that as the day wore on I would have started feeling worse and worse about going to school on Monday. Not because of the homework – I never had any problems with that – but simply because of all the crap I was going through back then. The nastiness, the taunts, the lies . . . the sickening knot that twists in your stomach when you see the faces you don’t want to see . . . and you know you should just ignore it all – it’s nothing, they’re nothing . . . it’s a waste of time even thinking about them . . .