Free Heart-Shaped Bruise by Tanya Byrne Page A

heard,’ she said, and I remembered why I wasn’t doing Drama. Why I was there.
    ‘She’s been through a lot,’ she added and I looked at the poster again.
    ‘You have too, Rose,’ she said, her voice lowering. It made my stomach knot.
    ‘I suppose.’
    ‘How are things at home?’
    I shrugged. ‘Fine.’
    ‘How’s your mum?’
    ‘Fine.’
    ‘Your parents just got divorced, right? You’re living with your mother now. How’s that going?’ She held her hand up. ‘Don’t say fine!’
    ‘
Good
.’
    ‘Good? That’s two words! Now we’re getting somewhere.’ Shepointed at me over the desk. ‘Let’s make it three. Tell me about your dad, do you still see him?’
    I knew she’d ask, but it still made the tops of my ears burn again so I lowered my chin until my hair fell over them, sure that if she saw how red they were, she’d know I was lying.
    ‘No. He’s a surgeon, so he works weird hours.’
    ‘And your mum?’
    ‘She’s a medical rep so she’s on the road a lot.’
    ‘That must be hard.’
    ‘I suppose.’ I started to pick at my nail varnish. It was so quiet that I could hear a tutor in the corridor berating a student for not turning off his phone in class.
    ‘How’s your mum? All of this must have been really hard on her.’
    ‘Fine.’
    ‘Okay,’ she said with a long sigh, pressing her fingers to her eyelids. If she wasn’t a teacher, I think that’s the point at which she would have picked me up and shaken me. I kind of want to introduce her to Doctor Gilyard, sometimes, but I’m sure that if you put the two of them in a room together, one of them would spontaneously combust.
    ‘Okay, Rose,’ she said, holding her hands up. ‘Okay. I know things are all over the place right now and I’m the last person you want to talk to about it. I do. If I was seventeen, there’d be about forty-seven people I’d talk to before I talked to a teacher, including the bloke who used to stand outside Oxford Circus tube with a megaphone asking everyone if they’re a sinner or awinner.’ She smiled softly. ‘All I’m saying is that I just got divorced. I know how horrible it is at home right now. I’m just grateful I don’t have kids so that they don’t have to see me sobbing and eating cheesecake straight from the freezer.’
    ‘It isn’t like that.’ I sat back in the chair with my arms crossed. I don’t know what she said to make me so defensive, if I’d agreed or pretended to cry about how miserable I was, like I did with Mike and Eve, she would have left me alone. But I glared across the desk at her. ‘Mum’s fine. Not all women are hysterical and eat their body weight in Ben and Jerry’s because their husbands leave them.’
    As soon as I had said it, I looked away, furious with myself. I don’t know how, but she’d found a raw nerve and dug her five-inch heel in.
    I expected her to swipe back, but her eyes lit up. ‘Hello, Rose. There you are.’
    She smiled but I couldn’t look at her and stared at the Spice Girls alarm clock on top of her filing cabinet instead.
    ‘Where’ve you been, Rose? This girl,’ I could see her waving my file out of the corner of my eye, ‘the girl who sits doodling in class and paints half-arsed bowls of fruit isn’t the girl I’ve been told about. The girl with the bright red hair who reads Andrea Dworkin between lessons. What’s going on, Rose?’
    When I didn’t respond, she carried on. ‘Your English lit tutor says that you spend most of your time looking out of the window, but the moment he said something remotely negative about Daisy Buchanan you were all over him.’
    I shrugged. ‘That’s what happens when you read too much Dworkin.’
    ‘Hey,’ she said, her gaze narrowing. ‘Humour as a defence mechanism is
my
thing. Get your own thing.’ She wagged her finger at me. ‘And drunk on Dworkin or not, your English lit tutor said you were articulate and witty, if a little dismissive of the point he was trying to make. But