Free Life Drawing for Beginners by Roisin Meaney

when I get home. And thanks for looking after Eoin.”
    “What looking after? He’s no trouble. You should get out a bit more.” Her mother eyed the bag on Jackie’s shoulder. “What’s that you have?”
    “Just a towel,” Jackie lied. “We were told to bring one, for the cool-down.” Amazing, how easily the lies came.
    “Bring a dressing gown,” Audrey had said, “that you can slip on and off.”
    Jackie thought of slipping off the dressing gown in front of them all and her stomach lurched for the thousandth time. She hoped to God she’d be able to keep down the bit of dinner she’d managed to eat. She’d been jittery all day at work, her anxiety increasing as the evening had drawn nearer.
    A mistake, a huge mistake. She wasn’t cut out for this, she didn’t have the nerve for it. But it was much too late to back out now, she’d have to go through with it. She’d endure tonight somehow and tell Audrey she’d have to find someone else for the rest of the classes. She opened the front door and stepped out into the cool evening air.
    “You can feel the autumn coming,” her mother said. “Are you sure Dad can’t drive you?”
    “No, no—I could do with the walk.”
    Imagine meeting Audrey outside the college, imagine her saying something to Jackie’s father that would give the game away. It would be like Santorini all over again.
    “Enjoy yourself, love, see you later.”
    “See you.”
    Enjoy yourself —if she only knew what her idiot of a daughter had signed up for. As Jackie made her way to Carrickbawn Senior College she marveled, not for the first time, at how life had returned to normal in the Moore household after she’d turned it upside down over six years earlier. It hadn’t seemed possible, in the awful weeks following her revelation, that she’d ever be forgiven.
    Her father leaving the room anytime she walked in, hardly able to look at her if they met on the stairs. Her mother’s accusatory, tear-filled rants, wailing that Jackie had disgraced them, that they’d never again be able to hold their heads up.
    Jackie’s friends had assured her that given time, they’d come around. “When the baby is born,” they’d said, “things will change, wait and see.” But Jackie hadn’t believed them. Her friends hadn’t a clue, none of them had been in her situation. If anything, the baby would make things worse, would be a constant reminder to her parents of how stupid Jackie had been.
    “Your whole life ahead of you,” her mother had sobbed, “anything you wanted to do, all waiting for you. And now this, everything gone, the Leaving Cert useless to you.”
    And Jackie had remained silent, knowing that it was all true. She had ruined her life, she couldn’t deny it. She’d gone to Santorini with three friends the summer after the Leaving Cert. She’d drunk too much and taken a chance, like so many others, and she was one of the unlucky ones who’d been caught.
    She had no idea who Eoin’s father was. She remembered he was English, but that was it. They’d met in a bar and they’d made their way to the beach afterwards. Jackie had woken, headachy and alone on the chilly sand as the sun was coming up. She’d never seen him again. They’d been together for a few drunken hours and they’d made a child, and he’d go through the rest of his life not knowing that one summer he’d fathered a son.
    By the time Jackie realized she was pregnant, a fortnight before she was due to start college, her holiday tan had long since faded. She’d confessed to her parents—what else could she do?—and all hell had broken loose.
    And now Eoin was six, and his grandparents had doted on him from the day he was born. And twenty-four-year-old Jackie, who’d given up her college place, worked in a boutique that was owned by a friend of her mother’s, and she couldn’t say that she was unhappy.
    She rounded the last bend, and the gates of Carrickbawn Senior College loomed ahead of her. She