Free Girl Saves Boy by Steph Bowe Page A

such good friends we’re going to live together. I know that boy Sacha, and we’re good friends as well and maybe even more.
    Then I fall asleep and I get the nightmares, then I wake up and get the real world, and I can’t decide which is worse. I don’t know how much longer I can endure either.
    My dreams can never be reality. Not one part of them. Coming up with these grand schemes that involve dead people and strangers is an exercise in futility. I just feel worse in the morning, remembering the plans for the future I’ve concocted in my head the night before.
    People always say all the right things:
    ‘Don’t blame yourself.’
    ‘He’s in a better place.’
    ‘Everything happens for a reason.’
    ‘It’s okay to grieve.’
    ‘Let me know if there’s anything I can do.’
    All these words are empty. They mean nothing. They’re printed in self-help books on grieving and healing that you find in clearance bins outside bargain book shops and newsagents. They’re just words, and they don’t do anything and no one cares that much.
    All the offers and kind words stopped when I went to my grandparents. Originally, I was going to come back and live with Mum after a few months. But gradually, Grandma and Grandpa’s became home. After a while, Mum stopped calling so much.
    Of course, I wonder where my father is now. At least I know that Grandpa, Grandma and my brother are dead and buried. Who knows where my father is? Is he dead or alive? Who even knows who he is?
    I resent him the most—leaving Mum, forcing her to send me to my grandparents. I wonder how things would have turned out if events after my brother’s death had been different. If Dad had been able to stay with us, stay with Mum. For us to become a family again. Maybe even if Grandpa and Grandma had sold their country property and bought a place near us, so that they could have looked after me and I still could have had Mum around as a parent. What would have happened if I had been able to stay at the same school, to go to school with True, to have met Sacha earlier?
    It was so awkward at school after my brother’s death. There were so many different stories that spread around. Kids weren’t necessarily mean— just curious, shocked. They liked my brother. Kids don’t die. Had I really pushed him? Even the well-intended things hurt.
    Dad left—just drove off one afternoon with an overnight bag full of clothes and never returned— and Mum got worse with the anti-depressants and the overdoses. And soon after that I was sent away from it all.
    It’s a blur, when I remember it: it all moves way too fast, and I think it was like that back then, too— everything speeding by, nothing for me to hold on to. There’s Mum passed out on the ground and me on the phone and a woman wearing a pantsuit and she has a very faint moustache, then Grandma and Grandpa cuddling me, squeezing my hand, whisking me away to their house, in the country. At first it seemed like it would just be a holiday—I’d stayed there during the summer in the past—but then I started school, and more time passed, and my life had changed drastically and without my permission.
    Everything was different—my brother had died, but I’d lost my whole family, left behind my friends and school and everything I knew, and not once did someone ask me if I wanted this—and I couldn’t go back, no matter how much I wished I could.
    I haven’t said his name out loud in so long.
    Ben. His name was Ben. Benjamin Valentine.
    It’s such a common name. I’ve known so many boys called Ben. But—and this will sound pathetic for sure—every time I hear the name, I think of him, of his face, of my older brother whom I half-hated half-loved and admired like only an eight year old can, and I almost cry. It was ten years ago, and still I want to cry, and do cry.
    Eight years with Ben. Ten years without Ben. Though I remember little about those eight years, I can guarantee that these ten years have