Free The Big Lie by Julie Mayhew

past me.
    Frau Gross watched us from her living room window as we walked out into the cool spring air, up out of the cul-de-sac of Lincoln Drive, and down the cut that took us to the stream and the ditches. We said nothing. There was just the rustle of our backpacks, the riffing of the birds, a light breeze through the leaves. I could hear Clementine thinking; it was as loud as the whirring of a clock.
    ‘What’s up with your mum, then?’ I asked, lightly, as if Frau Hart had just been a little moody.
    ‘PMS,’ Clementine replied, not missing a beat.
    She picked up her pace and I picked up mine, and then, noticing that I’d done this, Clementine slowed down to a crawl. So did I. Then she jolted into a march again. And I copied her.
    Clementine started laughing. ‘God, Jess, you’re just such a sheep!’ And she carried on laughing. Harder now. I watched her until it became infectious and I had to join in. There we were, Jessika and Clementine, giggling away, back to how we used to be. But then Clementine’s laugh turned, and she was crying. Really crying. Big, heaving sobs. I’d never seen her properly cry before. It wasn’t something that Clementine did.
    ‘What’s up?’ I asked.
    Clementine kept walking, a plodding pace now. ‘Ask your fucking dad,’ she muttered. ‘Doesn’t he know the answer to everything?’
    I managed not to be spiteful back. Envy could be a horrible, corrosive thing. Dad had taught me that. I had good, solid parents, the type of people who guided and protected me; Clementine did not. She was angry. Angry and jealous.
    ‘I’m here for you, Clem,’ I said. ‘I can help you.’
    I put a hand on her shoulder, which she jerked away, as if it had stung her, or would infect her with something.
    ‘It’s all different now we’re not kids, isn’t it?’ Her voice trembled.
    ‘We are still children,’ I said, in an attempt to reassure her. In an attempt to reassure myself.
    We carried on along the path through the wood, the sound of our footsteps changing under the canopy of trees. Then she told me.
    ‘I’ve got my date,’ she said. She pressed her teeth together. The pain of something stretched her mouth really wide. The tears were streaming down her face.
    I could hear Angelika Baker’s righteous braying somewhere behind us. We both turned to see her there, a short distance away, arm in arm with Erica Warner. Michael Baxter and Karl Pfizer were kicking along in their wake.
    We snapped our heads back around and Clementine wiped her face dry of tears. They would catch up with us in a moment.
    ‘Your date for what?’ I asked.
    She took a few deep breaths, sighed them away, trying to get rid of the hiccups that had come with the crying.
    ‘For what, Clem?’
    She didn’t want to say. Or she was cross that I hadn’t worked it out.
    ‘Tell me.’
    Her features were swollen and quivering. She took her finger and she sliced it, hard, across her belly, the very lowest part, and then she sliced that finger back again in the opposite direction. A terrible X.
    I watched Clem write her essay in history. She didn’t cry then, but she was twitchy and strange, as if there was a bomb in her pocket, seconds away from detonation. We had been told in English lessons never to say someone is ‘writing furiously’ because that is a cliché, but that was what Clementine did in that hour. I thought she might tear holes in the paper. Clementine didn’t usually take exam-condition lessons seriously. She’d look around the room, pull faces at the rest of us who actually cared about our education. But that day she wrote from the moment Herr Manning said, ‘Turn over your papers,’ and she kept on writing. Furiously. She was finished well before everyone else. She scraped her chair back, threw down her pen, walked out.
    I did a terrible job. I couldn’t get all the information to hold together like it had around the table with Dad the night before. I’d get an A-minus at best.
    As soon as we had