Free You Can Trust Me by Sophie McKenzie Page A

kitchen door, enjoying the spectacle.
    Georgina left the house with Mum threatening to call her father as soon as the party was over and tell him what she had stolen. This was a heavy threat, because it was well known that Georgina’s father was a drunk and a bully. I caught up with Georgina halfway along the road, insisting that if she would only kiss me after all, I would tell Mum the whole thing had been a prank.
    Georgina angrily agreed. She pulled me behind the nearest buddleia bush and proceeded to kiss me. Properly. With tongues and everything. I had never experienced anything like it. After about ten seconds, she pulled away, leaving me inflamed with excitement.
    â€œOkay?” she snarled.
    I pointed to her chest. “Show me them too,” I said.
    Georgina protested.
    I insisted. “Or my mum tells your dad.”
    Georgina hesitated, then unbuttoned her shirt. Less angry now, her face was red and her fingers were trembling. One of the little plastic buttons popped off. I picked it up, took a good look at Georgina’s breasts, then asked her to raise her skirt.
    Again, she hesitated, then hitched it up. I peered at the tops of her skinny legs, at the triangle of blue cotton.
    â€œDown,” I ordered.
    She wriggled the pants halfway down her legs, turning her face away from me. I took my time examining what she had revealed, enjoying her shame as much as her body. After a while I told her she could go.
    As she readjusted her clothing, she looked me in the eye. “So you’ll tell your mum the necklace thing was a joke, yeah?”
    I turned and walked away, rubbing the plastic button from her shirt between my fingers.
    She called after me. “Please?”
    A smile crept across my lips.
    I returned to the party. No one had noticed my short absence. I had, to be sure, lost out financially today, but I’d gained something far more precious.
    Did I tell my mother the truth?
    What do you think?
    A few hours later Mum made her phone call and a few days after that I saw Georgina in the street with a black eye and a few days after that we got a new babysitter named Kim.

 
    CHAPTER FOUR
    After the wake, Will drops me at home, then drives into the office to deal with whatever Leo needed doing on the French account. He seems distracted as he says good-bye, and it flashes through my head that he may be about to speak to Catrina, who, after all, works out of the Paris office. The old fears flicker inside me. Could seeing her again have reignited his desire for her after all?
    No, that’s ridiculous. There is nothing in Will’s behavior that justifies my thinking that. I put on a wash and tell myself not to be stupid.
    Mum calls as I’m hanging out the wet clothes. She sounds terrible, all croaky and snuffling. She keeps saying how sorry she is for missing the funeral, for not being there to support me. I can hear in her voice that she’s not wildly impressed that Will has gone back to work this afternoon, and immediately I leap to his defense.
    â€œIt’s hard when you’re not family,” I insist. The way I was sidelined at the funeral by Joanie and Robbie springs into my head. “Leo was actually very sweet, but Will’s too senior to take off the whole day. He’s deputy MD now as well as planning director, remember?”
    Mum falls silent. I wonder if her memories are taking her back to my sister’s funeral eighteen years ago. It was so different from Julia’s, I hadn’t really thought about it earlier, but now the recollections fill my mind. Whereas Joanie made use of a nondenominational mortuary and requested no flowers, as per Julia’s supposed suicide note, the church near Mum and Dad’s was awash with blooms of every description. In a terrible parody of a wedding, flowers filled the side aisles with sweet scents—not just the lily of the valley and roses that decorated the church, but also hundreds of bouquets laid inside