Helen Oyeyemi - The Icarus Girl

“Why don’t you think Shivs is a good friend?” she asked, doubt smudging the features of her face.

TillyTilly reached out and pulled angrily at Jess’s friendship bracelet until Jess had to drag her arm away in order to save it from being torn apart.

“DON’T!”

“You like her better than me,” Tilly said. Her voice was pitched slightly higher, tinged with the dawning of surprise.

Jess issued a swift denial, “I don’t, I don’t,” her chief objective being to get Tilly to stop being cross with her. “Me and you are twins, and Shivs is just my friend—”

But then, feeling as if she had betrayed Shivs, she added, “—and she IS a good friend, and really nice!”

TillyTilly stared at her, unconvinced.

“Don’t tell her about me,” she warned. Then, with a sly smile creeping over her face: “She’ll think you’re mad.”

Jess felt her skin flush an angry red.

“I know,” she muttered, tossing her green pencil back into the pencil box. “She wouldn’t understand about. . all that.”

“People who aren’t from the same place as us don’t understand about all that,” Tilly corrected her. “I came to you in Ibadan because you were sad, and all by yourself. And I came to you here because you were sad, and all by yourself. You had no twin anymore. And you wanted me to come,” she continued, as a note of reminder.

“I know!” Jess found herself trying not to scowl. What was the matter with her? What Tilly was saying was true. TillyTilly was her best friend, and they’d gone to the amusement park, and Tilly was the only one who understood about Fern, and sometimes she was the long-armed woman who told stories and sang—

“I’m not going to GO AWAY just because you have a new friend!” TillyTilly spoke from the chair now, her arms folded.

“I KNOW,” Jess cried, then, realising that the sound was too harsh. “I don’t want you to go, anyway!”

“I know!” TillyTilly mimicked Jess’s voice uncannily before springing off the chair and turning a perfect cartwheel. “D’you still want to be like me, Jessy?” she said as Jess gazed on in admiration.

Jess thought about it, then realised that she didn’t, really. And that she hadn’t for some time. For a little while it had seemed to be. . OK just to be her, Jess. She packed up the rest of the coloured pencils as she racked her brains for a tactful way to say it so that Tilly would be nice again, but when she turned around, TillyTilly had gone.

That evening, Shivs and Dulcie were coming to stay over; Shivs by mutual agreement, Dulcie because. .

“I’m coming next time that clap-games girl comes around, OK?” (from Dulcie, at Christmas) and: “You can’t just FORGET to tell her! That’s a little shabby, Jess. . I’m surprised at you!” (from Jess’s mum, the day before yesterday — blah, blah blah)

Jess was unsure how she felt about Dulcie and Shivs meeting (what if they liked each other better?) and she was also a little indignant that she was expected to share her friends with Dulcie. When had she ever asked to play with Dulcie’s friends?

Shivs phoned at five o’clock to say that she was about to get in the car with her dad to be driven over, and also that she was bringing her special glittery blue cat’s cradle string because she’d just remembered that Jess had told her Dulcie was rubbish at cat’s cradle. Shortly after this, Dulcie, wearing her show-off jeans with lavender glitter around the pockets and her blond hair in a glossy French plait, was dropped off by Aunt Lucy, who, tired and puffy, had started to look much more pregnant. Dulcie immediately bounded upstairs with Jess to display her new charm bracelet and (out of earshot) to complain about Sarah Harrison’s Barbie ban, while downstairs, Lucy’s brother tried to persuade her to stay and have a cup of tea “or something,” an offer wearily rejected with the assertion that if she didn’t head for home now, then she never would.

Upstairs, once Jess had sufficiently admired the star saying “I wish. .” and the moon saying “I dream. .” and the heart saying “I love. .” in tiny letters that hung from Dulcie’s silver charm bracelet, Dulcie bounced on the bed and looked in disdain at the two blow-up mattresses that dominated the floor of Jess’s bedroom.

“Bags I this bed!”

Jess, taking advantage of the falling dusk to creep to the window and draw the curtains closed, cackled wickedly and elicited a small scream from her cousin.

“Oi, no, the bed’s mine. That’s the rules!”

Dulcie clambered off the bed and stumbled her way to the light to turn it on.

“No it isn’t!”

“It IS, though—”

“I’m telling Aunt Sarah! I’m not sleeping on the floor, my mum said she doesn’t like it!”

“Ah, shut up! You slept on the floor before! You just don’t want to sleep next to Shivs ’cause she’ll see you with your mouth all open like uuuurghh . .”

They erupted into a twittering storm of giggles as Dulcie tried to grab Jess’s ponytail and chased her around the room as she leapt over the mattresses and scrambled across the bed.

“I give up, stop, stop,” Jess panted, collapsing onto one of the floor mattresses, and Dulcie, smiling triumphantly with wisps of hair floating out of her formerly immaculate plait, fell onto Jess’s bed.

“You’re all different again,” Dulcie commented, after a few moments in which Jess had crawled over to her cousin and was laughingly attempting to tuck the escaped hair back into its previous order. “I wish you’d just decide how you were going to be and sort of. . well, BE it!”

Jess was about to reply when they both leapt up in response to the sound of Colin McKenzie and his daughter being greeted downstairs. Shivs bolted up the stairs with her overnight bag slung across her body, shouting excitedly as Jess and Dulcie sped towards the staircase with Dulcie in the lead, resulting in a Shivs-Dulcie collision in which they both fell down. Jess hung back and let out a shout of delighted laughter as her mum came up the stairs and watched with her lips pursed and her hands on her hips in mock disapproval. Shivs and Dulcie rapidly untangled themselves and rose, each girl’s face stained crimson with embarrassment. Shivs looked particularly striking.

“Er. . sorry,” she managed, before tossing one pigtail over her shoulder and brushing past the still “ouch”-ing Dulcie to whisper to Jess, “Look at her hair!”

Sarah had gone back downstairs, calling out to Colin that it was only a minor collision, and Shivs ran back to the top of the stairs to shout out “Bye, Dad!” before he left. Jess had to struggle to maintain a straight face as Dulcie instantly began to ingratiate herself with Siobhan. As soon as Shivs had thrown her overnight bag into the corner of Jess’s bedroom—“With stuff for later,” she promised with a devilish grin — Dulcie pulled out her hair bands and sat on the bed, running her fingers through her hair so that the plait was loosed and the straight yellow length of it fell down her back.

“My hair got messed up before,” she said plaintively. Shivs looked unimpressed, but Dulcie forged ahead: “Could you and Jess do something else with it?”

“Don’t mind.” Shivs shrugged and looked at Jess. Dulcie, who by now had assessed where the power lay, also looked at Jess. Under the pressure of all this looking, Jess tried to muster some authority.

“OK, we can all have pigtails like Shivs. Shivs, you take that side of her head, and I’ll take this one — then you two can do my hair.” Accepting a hair band from Shivs, she took a deep breath and eyed both of them as sternly as she could. “Then we’re making puff-puff.” Shivs pulled a face at Jess, then snorted with laughter, busily smoothing out her half of Dulcie’s head of hair with her hands.