Zoe Markham - White Lies

The wall above each of the other beds was plastered with photos of smiling, laughing teens, and on two of the bedside tables there were framed photos of ridiculously good-looking guys, one throwing a smouldering smile at the camera, and one with his arm around a stunning redhead. The third boasted a tattered photo of what looked to be an ancient Alsatian, and it made me smile.

I’d only brought one photo with me – one real one anyway, there were plenty on my phone – but I wasn’t ready to display it just yet. Pulling my battered, dog-eared novel out of my case, I opened it to where the photo marked my place, and felt my heart attempt both a leap and a nosedive at the same time. I closed it again gently, and laid the book on the small bedside table.

I got on with making my bed up and unpacking, before I could start thinking about things and getting upset, convincing myself that it’d be good to look ‘settled’ by the time the others got here. I hung my school clothes – the exact same unimaginative navy blue and white as all the others I’d been through, just with a slightly different crest on the sweatshirt – in the narrow wardrobe. My own clothes, mostly oversized jeans and hoodies, got crammed in around them. I stacked my new stationery on my desk and filled the bedside table with more well-thumbed paperbacks and my trusty Kindle.

The wide, inviting drawer under the bed, the only one with a key sitting pretty in the lock, cried out for my stash. I chewed on a thumbnail as I considered it. I could just throw it all out – dump the lot in one of the big Biffa bins that would inevitably be sitting out back somewhere. I could leave it all behind me once and for all – make this fresh start real. Or, I could just hold on to it for a bit, let it help me through the first few days and then ditch it when I was settled. It wasn’t like I was going to use it, after all. It just helped, knowing it was there. I listened carefully for footsteps out in the corridor, then pulled the two concealed carrier bags from my case and shoved them inside. I slammed the drawer on them and flicked the lock, slipping the key into my pocket before I could change my mind.

And that was me pretty much done. I started to feel a tightness in my chest as I looked at my little corner of the dorm, that familiar early warning of anxiety on the horizon. The walls started to slowly press in around me, and it didn’t feel as if there was enough air in the room. My fingers found the bracelet again, worrying at the tiny knots so hard I was afraid they’d all unravel.

Not losing it already are you, Abs? Beth’s voice was always there in the back of my mind. The best friend, the best big sister a girl could have. I knew it sounded corny, but so what, it was true – she was the one person who’d always been there for me, no matter how many times we upped and moved with Mum and Dad’s ever-changing deployments. The only constant. It had been difficult, almost impossible half the time, to make friends and hang on to them, but I’d lucked out because I had my best friend there with me all the time. Except for now, of course. I was here, and she was off settling in at uni, and nothing was ever going to be quite the same again.

Quit overthinking it, Doofus. We’ll talk online. And the holidays’ll be here before you know it.

She’d told me so many times. It was burned into my brain, but still it was hard to hold on to. I’d be OK for a bit, then I’d feel myself slipping again.

You’re not on your own.

Trying not to look at the walls as they pressed in towards me, I leant over to pull the curtains back from the window, fumbling with a fiddly, ancient-looking screw-fitting before I could finally fling the sash up high enough to let in the late summer air. I took a deep breath and filled my lungs with it, as a gentle breeze skimmed across my skin.

“You’ve always got to look for the positives,” Dad had kept telling me. All summer long. And I got that, I really did. It was just that sometimes the positives were really, really good at hiding.

A shriek from outside overrode my overthinking, and I stuck my head out of the window to see what was going on. The dorm faced out directly onto the courtyard, and I could see cars lining up outside the gate now – disgorging laughing kids with enormous bags. No one looked up at the new girl in the window; everyone was busy looking for their friends at ground level. I got to be invisible, anonymous, for just a little while longer.

A brightness in the trees to the left caught my eye: a flash of midnight blue, followed by a fierce flare of red in the sunlight. I stuck my head out further, risking discovery to peer across at the branches swaying in the late-afternoon breeze. And there he was again. “How’s your wife, Mr Magpie?” I only whispered it this time in case anyone did look up and think I was insane. Do you even have to say it again if it’s the same one? If it even was the same one. He’d need a name if he was going to keep showing up. I watched as he flicked his head from side to side, as if he was telling me ‘no’ – no what? No I don’t have to say it again? No he’s not the same one? Shouldn’t he, perhaps, have been nodding ‘yes’, as in ‘yes, Abby, you’re losing your mind, talking to a bird’?

His eyes locked on to mine as I thought it – the only soul out there who saw me. They flashed a deep, disturbing shade of red – a trick of the sunlight, no doubt, and presumably the flare I’d initially seen. I tried to hold his gaze. It felt like a question of pride. My eyes started to burn, and he emerged the clear winner as I closed them to clear the bright, piercing after-image of his own.

When I looked again, he was gone.

I told myself it could have been worse – it could have been a raven. That would have been way more creepy. The stuff of powerful poems and brooding teen dramas and meaningful nightmares.

Trust me to end up with a magpie. I never quite got it right.

Chapter Four

With nothing left to unpack, I had no reason to hang around in the dorm. Except that with people now starting to show up and swarm around, I suddenly really didn’t want to do the whole New Girl thing. That first bit, where everyone stares at you like you’re a new exhibit at the zoo and no one’s worked out what category of animal you are just yet; where you have to smile so hard to prove to everyone you’re not a predator that your face burns; at the same time as not letting anyone think you’re prey either. That bit doesn’t get any easier no matter how many times you go through it.

I started to wish I’d gone back down with Tyler. At least then I would’ve had someone there, to maybe make the introductions and take the pressure off. And everything was different this time. I wouldn’t get to go home at three o’clock. I wouldn’t get to argue with Mum over breakfast, and make up over dinner. I wouldn’t be able to con Beth into doing my homework for me. I wouldn’t be able to go home until Christmas.

My self-pity alarm went off in my head. I needed something to take my mind off it, and fast. It never mattered what you thought about, so long as you just didn’t think about the thing that hurt. No way could I go down there with red-rimmed eyes – that would put me smack bang into the ‘prey’ category with a huge target painted right on my back.

In the end I settled on trying to think of everything I knew about magpies. It didn’t take long, but it was kind of random enough to derail the bad thoughts. Magpies were bad luck if you saw them on their own – that was why you had to ask about their wife, because if you acted like there were two of them it was fine. Although I had no idea why no one ever asked about husbands.