Free The Unexpected Life of Carnegie Lane by Virginia Higgins Page B

were being drawn and quartered by the cruelest of audiences… Their peers.
    Sobian had tears rolling down her cheeks when her mother approached, she was angry, although tears always turned her attack from harsh to suddenly gentle. Olivia was reading the last of her abuse messages and looked up almost apologetically at her mother when she walked in. The emails bouncing meant that by now, their mum would know it had been shut down, and they may have just hurt her too in some way.
    “Well?” She began to question, not quite knowing where the sentence would end up. “Been an interesting day, wouldn’t you say girls?” She sat down in one of their bean bags that had a light reflected back on it from a mirror ball on the ceiling. She closed her eyes and waited to hear what they had to say. They couldn’t fix it, neither could she. She just had to allow the aftermath of this unnatural disaster to pave its own course. At least surviving disasters was one thing she had become really good at.
    “Mum…we are so sorry.” Olivia began, before she was cut off.
    “He isn’t angry, just if you’re wondering. He is worried for both of you. I take it from the tears and the amount of text messages, he was right to worry?” Carnegie opened her eyes and began staring at the ceiling, she didn’t look at either of them.
    “Yeah, it’s getting ugly. We just thought… We just wanted…I don’t know…To be special.” Sobian sobbed the word “special” so hard that it was almost inaudible.
    Carnegie sat up straight and looked at her girls in horror. Special was exactly what they were.
    “Sobi…you’re already special. How could you ever think you weren’t special?”
    “Because of everything… of what happened with Dad… I mean Mum, come on look at us.! Look at our life. Everything we had is gone… Everything.” Sobian was sobbing uncontrollably now. Suddenly all that time of Carnegie’s neglect to the emotions of those daughters, which was not deliberate just self preservation, was coming out in waves the size of small tsunamis. Carnegie was about to hear it all, if she liked it or not. Olivia then picked up the conversation where Sobian had involuntarily left off.
    “Do you know where our old class is right now Mum, where all our friends are, the ones we grew up with? They are in London, on their final year excursion. That should have been us. Snow skiing with our friends, trips overseas. Do you know where our excursion is this year Mum? It’s to Rockhampton! An even deeper hell pit than this one!” She sobbed a little more along with her sister before she continued to bombard her mother with everything she had until now, been unable to say. Carnegie was silent. She knew her daughters were right.
    “We don’t fit in here, we don’t have any real friends here. We don’t even have a life here! We hate this place and always have. And I’m sorry for telling you. I don’t want to hurt you and that’s why we never said anything. We just thought that maybe, somehow, this would be a good thing. That they would be happy for us, and that maybe we would be special and not strange anymore… Just like we used to feel.” They turned to each other and continued to cry in their mirror image embrace.
    Carnegie was mortified by now. She hadn’t even taken any of this into consideration. This was her fault. It was because she had been selfish this happened in the first place. If she could, if she had the money, she would have packed up right then and there, moved back to Paddington and sent those kids to London with their friends.
    Unfortunately, that wasn’t possible. She didn’t have the money and life would just have to continue in the “ pits of hell ” as the girls were proclaiming, for a little bit longer.
    It wasn’t really that Bundaberg was a bad town, it was a fantastic place. Sadly, you can’t run from your problems or personal disasters. No matter how much you try, they always come back to haunt you in one