Free Heart-Shaped Bruise by Tanya Byrne

do that thing first.’
    She stopped in front of me so I couldn’t get past. ‘The thing in my office?’
    ‘No.’ I pointed over her shoulder. ‘That thing at the thing.’
    ‘Oh,
that
thing. The thing where you to talk to me now or I call your mother?’
    I sighed and rolled my eyes at Juliet. ‘Run. Save yourself.’
    I didn’t have to tell her twice and as soon as she had disappeared down the corridor, Grace turned to me with a smirk. ‘Is she really going out with Sid King?’ When I nodded, she laughed. ‘Sid and Nancy. Too cute!’
    ‘Yeah.
So
cute. Didn’t he stab her?’
    ‘Oh,’ she said, drawing it out so it sounded about a week long.
    I shouldn’t have bitten, but I did. ‘Oh, what?’
    ‘You like Sid.
Awkward
.’
    I chuckled. ‘Yeah. Okay.’
    She was the first one to call me on it. I hadn’t considered it before then, but as soon as I did, the tops of my ears started burning.
    ‘Awkward. Awkward. Awkward,’ she said with each step.
    I made myself look at her feet in case my cheeks looked as hot as they felt. She was wearing high heels, green suede high heels. I remember staring at them. The teachers at St Jude’s didn’t wear green suede high heels.
    ‘Here we are! Come in,’ she said when we got to her office, sweeping in with her arm out as though she were introducing me to an old friend. ‘Welcome to Graceland. Get it? I’m Grace, and this is my, y’know,
land
.’
    I raised an eyebrow at her. ‘You’re quite the wordsmith.’
    When I stepped into the office, I had to stop.
    ‘I know.’ She nodded, walking over to the chair opposite her desk and picking up a handful of newspapers so that I could sit down. ‘This is what the inside of my head looks like.’
    I’d never seen anything like it. The teachers’ offices at St Jude’s had crooked stained-glass windows and oil paintings of sullen alumni glaring down from the wood-panelled walls. But the walls of Grace’s office were covered with posters for giving up smoking and safe sex, and the light from the only window wasfiltered though the tired leaves of a spider plant that hung over the edge of the windowsill as though it was trying to summon the energy to throw itself into the bin beneath it.
    When I sat on the chair opposite her desk, she had to slide a pile of paperwork out of the way so that she could see me. ‘Peek-a-boo!’ She grinned, then gasped, ‘Oh!’ and scribbled something illegible on to a pink heart-shaped Post-it note.
    When she slapped it on the desk, I tried to read it. I think it said MILK, but I gave up and looked into the mug by her phone instead.
    ‘Science project?’ I asked, pulling a face.
    ‘Don’t worry about her, that’s Penny,’ she said, and I blinked at her.
    ‘You named your mug?’
    ‘Penny, penicillin, get it? She’s gonna save the world one day, aren’t you, Penny?’ She tapped the rim of the mug with her pen. ‘Yes, you are.’
    Sometimes, when I’m sitting in Doctor Gilyard’s tiny white office, I think of that moment, of Grace and her pink heart-shaped Post-it notes.
    ‘Right, Rose. Rose Glass,’ she said, sliding a file out of one of the precarious piles on her desk. The pile wobbled, but didn’t fall. ‘How are you doing? Tell me everything.’
    I shrugged. ‘Fine.’
    ‘How are you finding the College of North London?’
    ‘Fine.’
    ‘And your classes?’
    ‘Fine.’
    ‘You’re doing A levels, right?’ She looked down at the file. ‘English lit, sociology, history and art and design? That’s a lot of reading. Are you keeping up?’
    ‘Yeah, I suppose.’
    ‘And I see you’ve made friends. Sid’s in my drama class. He’s brilliant, isn’t he? So sweet.’ She gave me a theatrical wink.
    I noticed the framed
Spring Awakening
poster on the wall behind her desk and suddenly wished I was in her drama class. When Olivia had suggested doing
Spring Awakening
at St Jude’s, Mr Carmichael almost had a stroke.
    ‘And Nancy seems lovely, from what I’ve