Cecelia Ahern - Flawed

“He wasn’t thrown out with your parents?” she asks.

“He somehow made his way back in. He had a phone in his hand. He was recording.”

No need to mention Carrick being in there, too. I need to keep something further for myself.

“Recording? There’s video? Oh my God. Okay, thank you, Celestine. Thank you.” She hangs up.

My heart is racing, anxious from reliving the moment, for revealing Mr. Berry’s possible video, also for asking about Carrick. I don’t want her to think that he has anything to do with this, and I don’t want to get him into trouble, but I have no other way of finding him.

Now that I’m awake and have the Branding Chamber scenario firmly in my head, I can’t go back to sleep. My head is pounding from hitting it earlier on the car, and I feel a large bump on my head. My mouth is dry, and I’m parched. I get out of bed, feeling shaky, and throw an oversized cardigan around my T-shirt.

I go downstairs to the kitchen, going straight to the fridge for water. As I open it, I sense a presence and turn around to see Mary May sitting in the corner of the room, in darkness, watching me. The overhead light of the oven fan is all she has to see by. She has a book, which she covers with her hands, the first time I’ve seen her flesh without the leather gloves. She smiles at my obvious fright, though she seems tired.

“What are you … I mean, why are you … you’re staying the night?” I ask.

She takes me in, looks me up and down slowly, and it makes me wrap the cardigan around me tighter. This woman gives me the creeps.

“Bearing in mind the events of tonight, I thought it best I stay here. That’s a fine bump on your head,” she observes.

My hand goes to it, and I wince. It’s pounding. I need water and headache pills. I help myself as she watches.

“You’re worried I’ll have a concussion?”

“No.” She laughs, but it’s not a joyous sound. It’s cruel, like she’s laughing at me, as though I’m the most stupid person she’s ever met. “I wanted to make sure you stay where you should be. No rule breaking. I know about events like these, what they do to a person.”

“What do you mean?” I down the pills and water.

“Revenge,” she says, and I see the coldness and the darkness in her eyes, and I think back to what she did to her sister, reporting her to the Guild, and then to her entire family when it turned its back on her.

“Is that why you did what you did to your family?” I ask. “Out of revenge?”

“No,” she says, not blinking, not seeming bothered that I’ve asked a personal question. “I caught my sister with my boyfriend. Reporting her to the Guild was out of revenge.”

The story is too close to home for me right now, and I wonder if she’s testing me. Does she know about Art and Juniper? She couldn’t. If she did, the Whistleblowers would have found him by now.

“My family…” She looks away a little, and I detect a hint of sadness that is quickly covered up. “That was just necessary.”

I get the shivers from head to toe.

She looks me over again. “Dr. Smith says nothing’s broken.”

“No. If you don’t count my heart, my pride, and my complete belief in humanity.”

I hold her stare, her eyes black in the darkness, and I almost think she gets it.

“No,” she says, simply, going back to her book. I see a Jane Austen cover. “I don’t.”

FORTY-NINE

THAT AFTERNOON PIA comes to the house. Apart from the dramatic trip to the police station with Dad, I have spent the day in bed curled up in a ball. Still aching from last night’s attack, I drag myself out of bed, pull on some loose dark clothes, and meet her in the library. I expect her to be seated in one of her crisp peach chic pencil skirts and blouses, but, instead, she’s pacing. Her shiny black hair is scraped back sharply, and she’s wearing jeans, sneakers, and a hoodie.

I look at her in surprise.

She looks at me in surprise.

“What happened to you?” I ask.

“Never mind me, what happened to you?”

The bruise on my forehead has come up nicely, an enormous, cartoon-sized bump that today has turned a shade of yellow and black. My face is scraped from the twigs and branches that cut my skin as I ran blindly through the trees in the darkness.

I sit in the armchair and wince from the pain in my stomach. My ribs aren’t cracked, but they may as well be.

“Celestine,” she says with urgency in her voice and nothing but concern on her face. So I have to drop the act. “What happened?”

I sigh. “Turns out there wasn’t a party. Not for me, anyway.”

“You were set up?”

“Ambushed, I believe the word is.” My eyes fill up at the memory of it, which is still raw in my mind and in my body. Each time I move, I feel the aches.

“That kid who invited you?”

“Logan Trilby. L-O-G-A-N,” I say slowly, sarcastically. “T-R-I-L-B-Y. Aren’t you going to write that down? Oh, no, of course not, nothing that might make people pity me.”

Her eyes are angry, but not at me. “You don’t want people’s pity, Celestine.”

“I actually do.” I half-laugh. “I want everybody’s pity, because then I will know that everyone is human, instead of whatever it is everybody is now.”

She sits down in the armchair across from me, but not delicately and prissy as before. She’s on the edge, feet parted, elbows on knees; she’s getting down and dirty today.

“What did he do?”

“Not just him. He had a few friends. Their mission was to humiliate me.”

“And did they?”

“Yes.”

“Tell me.” She’s being soft and patient, but underneath it there’s a sense of urgency about her today, nothing calm and calculated like our previous conversations. The first time we met, Pia was in “Pia TV Personality” mode, then I saw “Off-Duty Pia,” but this woman is new, this is a side to her I’ve never seen. I have been gullible in the past, but I believe this person.

“They put a sackcloth bag over my head, tied me up, hit me, kicked me, dumped ashes on me, stripped me, and locked me in a shed. That about covers it.”

I don’t mention their forcing the alcohol into my mouth—that would get me into trouble, even though I had no option. I’m not going to take my chances, not even with Pia in this mood.

Her eyes turn cold. “Logan Trilby. And who were the others?”

I give her fuller details and she shows her disgust, discomfort, and empathy in all the right places and I believe that she cares.

“So what’s happening?”

“Nothing. My dad arranged for everybody to be at the police station today. Principal Hamilton, Natasha, Logan, Gavin, Colleen. Their parents, apart from Angelina. Logan’s parents have vouched for him, said he couldn’t have had anything to do with it, because he was in Bible study.”

“They don’t believe he was lying?”

“ They’re lying. They say he was with them at Bible study.”

Her mouth falls open. “What about the other kids?”

“Natasha and Gavin blamed Colleen, said she masterminded the entire thing, in retaliation for something that happened between me and her mom.”

“What happened?” She naturally switches into her journalist mode.

“Can’t tell you. Natasha’s dad is some fancy lawyer, started jabbering on about human rights and his daughter protecting herself from a Flawed. The police aren’t going to do anything about it. They let the school punish us. My dad went crazy. Gavin and Natasha were suspended for two days. Colleen is expelled, but it doesn’t matter, because Bob Tinder was fired as editor of the newspaper—”

“Believe me, I know,” she interrupts, and her eyes start racing again as I see her mind ticking.