Free Goose by Dawn O'Porter Page A

he plays at school that is not the Matt I know. We don’t judge him for it, he just wants to fit in. But when he is with us he is so different, he’s lovely. We respect that he doesn’t want to be teased.’
    â€˜Who is this
we
?’ asks Renée, clearly trying to deal with this conversation bit by bit. I know I am giving her a lot of new information all at once, so I hadn’t expected her to take it on the chin.
    â€˜I told you  …  My friends and I – that
we,
’ I say.
    â€˜Who are these people, exactly? You suddenly believe in God, you go to church? You have a load of new friends you pray with and Matt Richardson is lovely? Christ.’
    Renée puts a fiver on the table and goes outside. I watch her walk to the other side of the road and light up a cigarette. Her arms are crossed and the hand holding the fag is up by her mouth. She is tapping her teeth with her fingers, lost in thought. It’s what Renée does when she is trying to work something out. I don’t go out to her. I will leave her to it, pay the bill and go home to get ready for tonight. Hopefully she will calm down soon.
    Renée
    I lie back on my bed staring at the ceiling. It’s my favourite place, where I do most of my thinking. My bedroom was never somewhere I could relax before. Sharing a room with Nell was stressful. Not to mention the fact that my mother died in that room at Nana and Pop’s house. But this room at Aunty Jo’s is clean, mine, no history. It’s where I can relax, chat to Mum without anyone hearing me.
    However, right now, I feel quite stressed. Flo is religious. What is that about?
    I am so used to Flo going through phases. Last year she got really into witchcraft. There is loads of it on Guernsey: a witches’ circle that you are supposed to run around three times and make a wish, and in a bush somewhere there is a massive cauldron that has apparently been there for hundreds of years. Flo became obsessed with it all and got loads of books out from the library on local witchcraft. That phase was entertaining. We went on loads of adventures and it was exciting.
    But then it turned into her being obsessed with magic. She saved up and bought a magic kit and started trying to teach herself how to do tricks. Every time I went round she would try a new one, but she was rubbish at it. Not to mention the fact that Flo is really shy, so any hobby that involves having an audience is never going to work. She would never have the guts to do it in front of anyone but me and Abi. When I told Aunty Jo about Flo and all of her fads she said, ‘It’s just her trying to work out who she is. She is looking for an identity. It’s normal for girls your age. All of those teenagers walking around with pink hair and studs through their noses? Most of them will be plain as anything by the time they get to my age. They are just hiding behind an exterior while they work out what is going on inside their heads.’
    As usual I am sure Aunty Jo is totally right, but Flo isn’t like other teenagers. She is more grown-up than anybody else, more grounded, more secure, even though she is paranoid. She doesn’t try to be anyone she isn’t in the way that everyone else does. Sure, she has her fads, but she is fundamentally always just Flo. She doesn’t show off or try to be cool to fit in – she just needs distracting, I think, from her morose thoughts about her dad. I know she thinks about him all the time and feels guilty about how sad he got before he had the heart attack. I know she feels that if she had made him happier it wouldn’t have happened. So she gets obsessed with things to keep her mind off it. I understand it, I think it’s actually quite admirable that she looks for things to perk herself up rather than wallow in the things that bring her down, but God? This is different. I don’t like it. I just don’t get it. And I have thought