Free Girl Saves Boy by Steph Bowe

and Sacha.
    ‘Jewel!’
    My brother was spluttering, still alive. I gasped and splashed towards him, and the blood thinned out to water, and the moon lit up everything.
    When I got over to him, I realised it wasn’t my brother at all. It was Sacha.
    ‘Where’s my brother?’ I panicked.
    Sacha started treading water beside me. ‘He’s dead, Jewel, he’s dead.’ Then he disappeared.
    And then I woke up.
    When I was young—really young—I used to think that the kids who had money, who were popular at school and who did well at things must have had horrible home lives—abusive parents or nasty siblings or lived in cupboards under stairs.
    It’s kind of sick when you think about it, but what I figured was that life should be fair—everyone had to have good and bad things in their lives, and no one could have a wholly good life or a wholly bad life because that would upset the balance of things.
    I know now that I was wrong.
    I haven’t spoken to anyone about my brother, apart from school counsellors who forced me to splutter sparse details (because it’s so goddamn healing ), and brief words with Grandma and Grandpa, which weren’t as bad as the student welfare counsellor asking me to bare my soul for her, but were still incredibly uncomfortable for me—I don’t think that will ever change.
    I was never openly blamed for my brother’s death, but I could tell people thought it. I’m not a mind-reader, but in the piteous looks I was given at the funeral, the sneers from old ladies who’d heard the rumours, I felt it. I heard it. I knew they were thinking it.
    Because even though I was an eight year old, someone needed to be blamed.
    That’s because of a basic fact: old people die. Grandparents and distant relatives. People with heart disease and failing lungs and colon cancer.
    Children die too. Little bald kids in hospitals. Not kids full of life and vitality like my brother. Not so unexpectedly, randomly.
    When I think about it—which is a lot, even though I try not to; I can’t get it out of my head—it could have been me in the child-sized coffin. The old ladies could have been casting looks at my still-alive brother, looks filled with suspicion and resentment. I think it would have been worse for him, since he was older.
    And I always think, Why me? Why did I live?
    When I was young—before his death—I had my sick ideas about the world being completely fair. As I got older I had this idea that everything that happened was meant to happen that way and it couldn’t be changed. Both ideas were ridiculous, and now I don’t believe in anything.
    I think a lot—when all you do is draw and go to school and sleep, and you don’t have friends or a proper life, you do a lot of thinking, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it feels like it sometimes, and I feel like a lonely, horrible beast that no one would ever love. Could ever love.
    I think about what would have happened if my brother had lived, and I had died instead? What if we had both survived?
    I’ve had dreams where my brother doesn’t die that day, where our lives go on perfectly. Our parents stay together. Our grandparents come and stay with us for holidays. I stay at my school.
    These dreams stopped when I was twelve or thirteen and I gave up on the idea of things being good again. Now that I’ve come back to live with my mother, they’ve reappeared, and I dream them when I’m lying in bed at night, trying to get to sleep.
    In dreams of my brother still alive, our parents are still together—I still know my father and he’s a good man, my mother is still the mother I remember from my childhood—and my brother’s well and truly finished school and I’m finishing school. I’ve got a spot lined up for a Fine Arts degree next year. My brother’s becoming a lawyer or a doctor or something equally smart and important. He’s got a girlfriend who’s a lot like True. I’ve gone to the same school as True growing up, and we’re