Free Amelia O’Donohue Is So Not a Virgin by Helen Fitzgerald

cupcakes.”
    The silence wasn’t long—probably not long enough for my ignoramus parents to realize that the girls would rather eat each other’s eyeballs than sleep at my house and have the stupid cupcakes I’d said I loved when I was like four —but it was long enough for my heartbeat to flit and flip at the speed of light.
    “That sounds wonderful, doesn’t it, Mandy?” her mother said.
    “Yeah. We’ll text you.” She looked at Louisa.
    Sure they would.
    • • •
    When we got home, a new fence had been erected along the field between our house and Mandy’s house.
    “What’s that?” I asked.
    “Oh, the Grogan’s always wanted that paddock,” my mother said. “We didn’t use it really.”
    So that was how they could afford my school fees. They’d sold half our land to Mandy’s family. The realization made me gulp loudly. Swallow the guilt. There, it’s gone.
    That night, my parents took me out to dinner in the onlyposh restaurant on the island—we’d been once when I was tiny, during a holiday before we moved from Edinburgh. I remember we sang funny songs and played I-Spy for the five hours it took to get there. To my surprise, my mother and my father didn’t say grace, and I’m sure I saw them holding hands under the table when I came back from the loo. Strange. They hadn’t shown any signs of affection for years.
    That night, my mother came to my room to say good night. As soon as I heard the door opening, I pounced to the floor to say my prayers.
    “…thank you for everything and sorry for my sins and please may I have some humility to the power of infinity. Amen.”
    I stood up and got into bed. My mother tucked me in and kissed my forehead and said, “I love you, Rachel. It’s so good to have you home.”
    The next morning over salty porridge, my father found something other than evil politicians in The Scotsman . “Look at this, will you, Claire?” he said, using my mother’s actual name.
    “Mmm,” she said, reading from the Jobs section. All I saw was the heading: “Broadcast Journalist.”
    “That looks perfect.” She patted him on the shoulder and put on the kind of real coffee we used to have in happier times in Edinburgh. I remember my father used to get up before usand put it on every morning. “Ah,” my mother would say back then, waking beside me (I always ended up in bed with them in those days). Inhaling the coffee fumes, she’d carry me from the bedroom to the kitchen and squash me between them as she kissed my father full on the lips.
    This slip back to our olden days was very odd indeed, but not as odd as christmas.
    • • •
    christmas was Sunday, and we started by going to church, just as we always did on Sundays, holding umbrellas, wearing thick coats, heads and shoulders down towards the ground where our lives also were.
    We listened to the chant-like hymns, the sermon filled with doom and gloom and not-happy occasions.
    The strange thing was that everyone looked at us oddly, like we were freaks, and while I would have agreed that my parents were in that category, I wasn’t, and it felt awful.
    John was in the back row, just behind the Grogans. I turned around during the service and nodded at him. His mother elbowed him in the side. He winced, then looked at the floor.
    Outside afterwards, Mandy and Louisa were chatting with him. They watched me come out of the church, giving me spectacularly dirty looks.
    Even Mrs. Crookston from the corner shop managed a one-eyed dirty look. For some reason, our family was being ostracized.
    “I’ve quit the paper,” my father said as we walked home.
    “Why?”
    “Because it was contributing to my slow and painful demise.”
    What?
    As we walked home, I spotted Bronte, the girl I’d met in hospital before going to Aberfeldy Halls. She was pushing a stroller along the main street.
    “Hi Bronte,” I said, trying to catch her eyes, which were lurking underneath the hood of her huge padded coat.
    She looked up,