Page 68 of The Book Swap
Georgia chose to stay with Mum after the breakup, on the weekends when she was back from uni. I chose Dad. She didn’t know how bad I’d got. How after one day at my new school, Matravers, I didn’t want to go back. I locked myself in my room for weeks. Even Bonnie couldn’t help me.
By the time Georgia came back for a weekend, I was close to failing my exams. I didn’t want to; I just couldn’t find the strength to leave my room. I heard her on the phone to Mum, saying she’d decided to live with Dad. With me. If it wasn’t for her I’d have failed everything. I might never have left that room again, but she doesn’t remember that bit. Just the bit where she wasn’t there.
“I can’t watch this happen again,” she says now.
I can feel my body vibrating against the icy wall behind me as I sit in my T-shirt and underwear, watching my sister wipe at her eyes. “First with Mum. Then James. Then Bonnie. Then your job. Now James again. At some point you’ve got to break the cycle. Respond in a new way. Today is that day.”
She’s right and I know she is, but it’s tiring, having to find the strength each time. To pick yourself back up when once again someone’s broken your heart and your trust.
“We don’t have to talk about him, if you don’t want to, but—”
“I don’t want to.”
“Okay. Just...he was so young, Erin. Back then—”
“I said I don’t want to.”
“If anyone’s to blame, it’s Mum,” she says, and I sit forward, mouth slightly open.
“I can’t believe you just said that.”
“Well, it’s true.” She shrugs. “But she’s just human. She made a mistake. We all make them, and in the long run it sort of worked out better for her. For everyone. They’re happier. Mum and Dad were never happy.”
She stands up and opens my wardrobe, throwing me a pair of jeans. Keeps her back to me and looks around her while I pull them on.
She reaches into the wardrobe again, throwing me a bra, a white V-neck T-shirt and a long navy jacket, before sitting on the bed.
“Is this even about James?” she asks, her eyes landing on the postcard from Bonnie.
She picks it up, turning it over to read the message and holds it up to me.
“How’s the living your dreams going?”
“Actually spectacularly well,” I say, putting my bra on under the T-shirt I slept in and then pulling on the clothes Georgia threw at me. Not bad choices. I might even have gone with them myself, on another day. A day where I intended to get dressed. “I tried,” I say.
She nods, her head tilted to one side.
“I did the whole ‘What Would Bonnie Do’ thing. I was actually getting somewhere.”
“You were. You have. But I wonder...”
“Uh-oh.”
She laughs. “Do you think it’s time to start asking yourself what Erin would do? She’s pretty smart too.”
“She’s a total failure.”
“I know you think some of this stuff was Bonnie, but it wasn’t. Not really. Taking the risk with the margins guy, teaching Savannah...that stuff was you. And correct me if I’m wrong, but what you promised Bonnie—it wasn’t that you’d live her life for her, it was that you’d make the most of your own.”
She stands up, reaching into the chest of drawers and turning around with a pair of socks.
I hold my hand out to catch them, but Georgia throws them, hard, at the side of my head.
“Ouch.” I unfold the socks and move to the edge of the bed, wrestling my foot into one of them.
“I’m going to ask you one more time to get up.”
“I seriously don’t understand why you pay for me to have therapy and then you try to give it to me for free.”